2003 IMTA Proceedings - International Military Testing Association

24
820 questionnaires done anonymously (coded) were sent to the private address of the
professional military personnel. 420 questionnaires were sent to professional officers and 400 to
professional non-commissioned officers. Both sample groups of addressees were of random
choice. The return rate was 61% (n=499). 19 questionnaires had to be disregarded because they
were insufficiently filled in, which means that there were a total of n=480 . The average age of
the total sample was 42.5 years.
Measures
The job characteristics (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and
feedback), satisfaction with salary and colleagues, perceived job security and leadership quality
(context factors) as well as job satisfaction were registered with the German version (van Dick et
al., 2001) of the “Job Diagnostic Survey” (JDS) by Hackman and Oldham (1975). The individual
contents of job characteristics were integrated into one scale value as suggested by Hackman and
Oldham. The respective items were put into a 6-point Scale.
A German translation of the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) by Maier and
Woschée (2002), was used to record the affective commitment. The range of the scale was from
1 - 7. 4 items (scale 1-5) by Baillod (1992) were used to record the intention to quit.
The Big 5 were recorded with the version MRS-30 by Schallberger and Venetz (1999). The
respective scale consisted of six bi-polar pairs of adjectives as “vulnerable” – “sturdy” or
“secure” – “insecure”. The test person had to indicate out in a 6-poit Scale how these adjectives
applied to him.
The reliability coefficients of the respective scales are shown in table 1. The context
factors could not be established because the items were too small to calculate a coefficient.
Results
The internal consistency of the scales were sufficient to very good. With reference to the
means it can be said that the variables job satisfaction (4.60) and job characteristics (4.44) were
judged as satisfactory to good, but not the context factors with the exception of the variable
satisfaction with colleagues. The variable affective commitment is lower than the variable job
satisfaction because it was measured on a scale from 1-7. The 4.55 represents a rather low level
of affective commitment. There was nothing conspicuous as to the means of the personality
constructs.
On the basis of the matrix it can be seen that there is a moderate to high connection but to
a varying degree between job characteristics, context factors and the variables commitment, job
satisfaction and intention to quit. The influence of the context factor satisfaction with colleagues
is far less than that of other variables.
M SD α 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
1 Job characteristics 4.60 .56 .84 -
Context factors
2 Job security 3.72 1.16 - .34 -
3 Salary 3.60 1.20 - .24 .48 -
4 Leadership 3.60 1.20 - .46 .48 .36 -
5 Colleagues 4.60 .92 - .29 .04 -.03 .20 -
Personality
45 th Annual Conference of the International Military Testing Association
Pensacola, Florida, 3-6 November 2003